A couple of weeks after the disastrous debut of its health insurance website Oct. 1, the Obama administration woke up and finally began doing what it should have done all along, bringing in a competent troubleshooter, consolidating fix-it efforts under a central coordinator and setting a real deadline — Nov. 30 — to repair the site.

That seems to have worked, at least to some degree. The White House announced Sunday that it had hit its target of having the website function smoothly for "the vast majority" of people who want to sign up, which it defines as about 80%.

Reasonable people could quibble that "vast majority" means 95%, but never mind. While it's hard to verify the passing grade the White House is giving itself, all accounts suggest the experience is much better than it was in October. Pages load much more quickly, with fewer errors, and — says the White House — as many as 50,000 people can work on the site at once without making it crash.

Anyone who wants a better health care system than the dysfunctional status quo should give a cheer, but a cautious one. Because for all the apparent good news, Obama and his signature effort are nowhere near out of the woods. The system still doesn't have enough capacity to handle a rush. And with two months of the six-month open enrollment period largely wasted, deadlines will come much more quickly now, and problems that were overshadowed by the website's catastrophic early failures will loom much larger.

For example:

For people whose insurance expires at the end of the year, the deadline for signing up for a policy that goes into effect Jan. 1 is Dec. 23, just three weeks away. Until now, website problems have been mostly annoying and inconvenient. Not having insurance coverage on Jan. 1 could produce real harm.

Insurance companies complain — and the administration admits — that prioritizing website fixes for consumers meant paying less attention to the back end of the system. There is a disturbingly high error rate in the information HealthCare.gov sends insurers about which customers have signed up for which policies. Worse, the administration told Congress two weeks ago that as much as 40% of the system hadn't even been built yet, including accounting and payment systems.

Obama has already had hellish problems after promising that if people liked their insurance, they could keep it. There could be a similar battle brewing over his pledge that people could keep their doctors, because insurers are shrinking doctor and hospital networks to cut costs.

These are only some of the potential challenges, and the almost incomprehensible mismanagement exposed by the website fiasco does not inspire confidence, particularly with political support eroding, an election less than a year away and Republicans doing everything they can to pour sand in the gears.

At this point, the administration has two things going for it. The first is that technological problems can be fixed. The second is that the critics have yet to propose an alternative that would deliver what Obamacare promises: to replace a harsh and costly insurance market with one that ensures good coverage at a fair price.

Those aren't small advantages. But the administration squandered more than three years of lead time. Whether it can recover quickly enough to keep its plan politically viable and economically sound remains very much in doubt.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.